"Things Are People!"

Not wishing to displease Josef Stalin, not a single foreign correspondent turned up in Leningrad last week to try to cover the trial of the assassin of the Dictator's "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10). Two thousand Red Army troops, their greatcoats nearly sweeping the ground, guarded historic Smolny Institute. There Red Boss Kirov of Leningrad was shot in his Party headquarters, and there last week Assassin Nicolaev was tried in blackest secrecy.

Government press releases supplied the only details. Nicolaev was said to have laughed at his judges, perhaps hysterical after nearly a month under third degree. Another accused conspirator, said the Government, fainted dead away.

To anyone familiar with Soviet trials the document offered as Assassin Nicolaev's confession bore earmarks of labored composition by the Gay-pay-oo. It confessed that an unspecified foreign consul/- gave Nicolaev 5,000 rubles and offered to put him in touch with Great Red Exile Leon Trotsky. "From Capitalistic darkness," editorialized the official newsorgan Pravda, "comes the stench which Kirov's murderers breathed!" According to Pravda, the leaders of the Trotsky faction accused in the case are "prostituted scoundrels, arrant blackguards, cowards, traitors, bankrupt politicians, deserters, outcasts of the human race and thrice accursed!"

One fact at the veiled trial seemed significant. Previously at such affairs the accused have been elderly or middle-aged persons at whom the Soviet Press sneered as "flotsam left over from the old regime." Youthful Russia has always been touted as solidly Bolshevik, solidly Stalinist. Last week the 14 accused at Leningrad were all young men in their 20's and 30's, Russians who have grown to manhood under the Red flag. They were accused broadly of a major plot to assassinate not only "Dear Friend Sergei" but the chief leaders of the Government, including Stalin. If such young men, all but one members of the Party at the time of their arrest, think Stalin should be assassinated, the inference of Red disillusionment is potent.

For the first time since "Dear Friend Sergei's" death, Dictator Stalin was again in top form last week, orating to the directors of the Soviet Union's largest metal plants in Moscow. "We are no longer a country of wood. We are a country of metal!" cried the man whose name means Steel. "The time has come to admit that the most important things to cherish are people who have learned mechanical technique!"

Next thing Russia knew, the 14 tried at Leningrad had been taken out and shot before their sentence was announced. The Government stated that they were denied legal defense to the last. The order to shoot was signed by famed Judge Ulrich who has been signing death warrants in batches these last few weeks during Stalin's campaign of "pure terror" (TIME, Dec. 17).

Paradoxically, the two Bolsheviks most loudly denounced, Comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev (onetime Trotsky henchmen) had not been shot. Rumor slated them for exile. The government would divulge nothing. Moscow seethed as Communists, puzzled by the black mystery of Stalin's proceedings, strove to construct an hypothesis which would fit the facts. Popular hypothesis: "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov, mentioned in Russia before his death with increasing frequency as an eventual successor to Stalin, was shot by order of the careful Dictator who brooks no rivals. Under pretext of avenging Kirov, Stalin was able to have shot 117 Russians whom he considered dangerous. If so devious and Oriental a maneuver were in prospect, it would entail steps similar to those taken: 1) The course of Soviet Justice was distorted by a special decree depriving the accused of counsel; 2) for the first time a major Soviet trial of world interest was not broadcast or otherwise advertised and correspondents were not present.

As an appropriate Communist nifty in last week's proceedings the city of Zinovievsk changed its name to Kirovo.

/- In their original attempts to extenuate Adolf Hitler's Blood Purge, Nazi secret police reported that the supposed plotters had been subsidized by an unspecified foreign diplomat, dropped their story when the Berlin Corps Diplomatique hotly demanded to know what diplomat.

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